2001/09/30 by Peter Arnold, Guy D. Moore, Laurence G. Yaffe · 11 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Atomic and Molecular Physics #Atomic physics #Bremsstrahlung #Coherence (philosophical gambling strategy) #Computational physics #Dust and Plasma Wave Phenomena #Inelastic scattering #Ionosphere and magnetosphere dynamics #Momentum (technical analysis) #Nuclear physics #Photon #Physics #Plasma #Quantum electrodynamics #Quantum mechanics #Scattering #hep-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1088/1126-6708/2001/11/057
published as JHEP 0111:057,2001 · 50 pages, 20 figures. Added references and minor rewordings: published version
openalex publication_date 2001/11/27 · arxiv created 2001/12/14 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
The emission rate of photons from a hot, weakly coupled ultrarelativistic plasma is analyzed. Leading-log results, reflecting the sensitivity of the emission rate to scattering events with momentum transfers from gT to T, have previously been obtained. But a complete leading-order treatment requires including collinearly enhanced, inelastic processes such as bremsstrahlung. These inelastic processes receive O(1) modifications from multiple scattering during the photon emission process, which limits the coherence length of the emitted radiation (the Landau-Pomeranchuk-Migdal effect). We perform a diagrammatic analysis to identify, and sum, all leading-order contributions. We find that the leading-order photon emission rate is not sensitive to non-perturbative g2 T scale dynamics. We derive an integral equation for the photon emission rate which is very similar to the result of Migdal in his original discussion of the LPM effect. The accurate solution of this integral equation for specific theories of interest will be reported in a companion paper.